Shaun Newman Podcast - #367 - Tim Moen

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Former leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada and 30 years as a firefighter/paramedic. We discuss the beginning of the AHS takeover, the slippery slope of MAID, a time & place for dark humour, the victim mindset and the rural urban divide.  January 22nd SNP Presents: Rural Urban Divide featuring: Vance Crowe, QDM & Stephen Barbour.   Get your tickets here: snp.ticketleap.com/ruralurbandivide/ Sylvan Lake February 4th Tickets/More info here: https://intentionallivingwithmeg.com/sovereignty Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

I'm Rupa Supermonea. This is Tom Korski. This is Ken Drysdale. This is Dr. Eric Payne. This is Dr. William Mackis. Hi, this is Shadow Davis from the Shadow at Night Live stream, and you are listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday.

I hope everybody had a great weekend. We got a little U7 hockey in, a little outdoors. It was a beautiful weekend here. I don't know about everybody else, but certainly enjoyed it. Now, I want to let everybody know Sunday, next Sunday. is the cutoff or well is the first cutoff I guess for tickets to uh... smp presents uh... rural urban divide with vans crow um... quick dick mcdick and steve barber

uh... so if you're interested in that show the link is in the show notes would love to see you there yes it's a sunday that is not a typo i know i've had a lot people ask me about that uh... vance is flying in for from st louis for a for a conference on monday tuesday and quick dick is in the area on celsius Saturday. So Sunday just became a logical date. I know it's kind of an odd day because, you know, most people spending time with family and everything else. I get it. But we'd love to see you there. And we got a short window to try and sell some tickets to it. So if you're interested, please look

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He's a former leader of the little. The Secretarian Party of Canada. He's had a 30-year career as a firefighter and paramedic. I'm talking about Tim Mowen. So buckle up, here we go. This is Tim Mowen, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to Sean Newman podcast. Today, I'm joined by Tim Mowen.

So thank you, sir, for hopping on. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. And now, I was just saying to you before we started, your pull you wrote was fantastic. And I assume we're going to get to that at some point, But I'm going to start you back at the start because there's going to be a lot of people,

including myself, that, you know, I guess it's eight years ago now when you would have been running, I assume. I've ran a few times since I. But I just, you know, I didn't pay attention to a whole lot of politics. You know, if your name was Wayne Grexie, everybody, when you walk on, everyone's like, ah, I got it.

So maybe we could just start with a little bit of your background. And we got plenty of time. So, you know, we'll see where it goes. Sure. Well, I mean, where do you want to start? I grew up on a farm in northwestern Alberta up around Grand Prairie and a little community called Teepee Creek, population 21, 16, when the Smith were on vacation. You know, I got into my career very early. So at the age of 19, I started in emergency services as a paramedic and eventually became a firefighter paramedic.

worked in Fort McMurray for about 15 years. And while I was there, you know, a number of things happened. The Alberta Health Services took over emergency medical services. They took over ambulance services. It became a provincial thing. And that really kind of got got me started in politics. You know, I, you know, I'm a libertarian. And at that time, I was a libertarian who thought that any engagement in politics

whatsoever was antithetical to liberty. It was just kind of encouraging the bastards. You know, in fact, I'd written an article explaining why voting was probably not only useless, but immoral. It was something like inciting violence. And, you know, inciting violence probably shouldn't be allowed. And, but, you know, at that point when Alberta Health Services was taking over ambulance services, I knew exactly what it would mean for my community.

it would mean we'd be stripped of control. And I mean, here we were people that lived in the community, were raising kids in the community, wanted nothing about the best for the community. And we took our job very seriously, and we were very engaged in the direction our service took in what kind of protocols, equipment, policies. We implemented that would best serve our community

that affected us directly, affected our families directly and that kind of informed us. And now that control would be stripped of us and be put in some bureaucrats hands in Edmonton who didn't have our community's best interests at heart, who had a mandate of centralizing services and managing from a top-down kind of socialist perspective. I knew this was going to be disastrous for not only our country, community, but for communities across the province. And so, you know, we, I was very outspoken about this. You know, I did, yeah, I was a bit more of a firebrand back then and did more provocative

things. I did a bunch of videos directly calling out, uh, the medical directors of this new AHS Politburo and some of the directors. You know, I did things like put on a hammer and sickle shirt, uh, and described it as our new AHS uniforms. And, uh, I got a lot of, um, a lot of attention on me. I guess my videos kind of had a cult following among EMS personnel who were like, yeah, screw the man. But it also got the attention of the authorities who were trying to get me fired as well at the time. We held a town hall. We alerted the public to what was going on. And, you know, we managed to hold on to our dispatch services at the time. They were going to take dispatch away from our fire department and move it across the province to Peace River at the time,

which made absolutely no sense on any level. It wasn't going to save any money for one thing because we still needed our dispatchers employed because they still need to dispatch fire trucks. So all it meant was they were going to be doing less work and not dispatching ambulances. And we were going to be dealing with people who didn't know the area and didn't know the community

and trying to figure out where to go based on these people. So we had a town hall and we managed to push back. We managed to hold on to our dispatch services. But of course, AHS took over, over our ambulance services provincial wide. And it's kind of been a shit show ever since. You know, we'll get into that in a little bit. But, you know, eventually, you know,

every firefighter has a side hustle. And my side hustle was doing audio and film production. And, you know, I made it my mission at the time to offer my services to every inviourable. environmentalists that was coming up from Hollywood wanting to make a documentary about how evil the oil sands were and how evil, you know, this community was. And, you know, I managed to get on a documentary filming with Neil Young and Daryl Hannah. And, you know, my goal here was to be friendly, to be welcoming and to ultimately shoot whatever they want. but while I'm doing that,

offer suggestions and raise points that might offer some cognitive dissonance that might influence their opinion about my community and about the industry that is so vital to this world, really, and so on. So, you know, I did some work with Neil Young. And, of course, when Neil Young came to town, we had a carnival in town called Sustainable. It was this eco-friendly.

Carnival run off the used cooking oil from the local restaurants. It had a solar power stage. And I suggested to Neil, why don't we get a shot of you on this stage singing to the residents of Fort McMurray powered by the sunshine, right? Because I think it would be very interesting to see this very environmental consciousness in the heart of dirty industrial oil company. Why is that?

Why is there this environmental consciousness? Isn't that interesting? just the juxtaposition ought to be, you know, artistically, it would be amazing, right? And of course, the subversive point there would be, look, you only get environmental consciousness in communities like Fort McMurray who care about the environment

because they have enough wealth, have built up enough wealth to care about these things. And in fact, the year before, we had banned plastic bags. I think we were one of the first communities in Canada to ban plastic bags, which was dumb. but it just goes to show you what people up there were thinking about. They were like, you know, they care about their community,

they care about their environment. And, of course, you know, they care about any pollutants that are coming from their neighbors, you know, the oil sands. And so that's why we have different regulations and different. So I thought this would be interesting. Of course, Neil didn't want to have anything to do with it. You know, he went out to the reservations and, you know, one, one, First Nations lady contacted me and said, you know, I was really kind of disgusted with Neil's visit

because we wanted to show him all the stuff we were doing, but he seemed to be only interesting in finding dead and dying Indians. And he wasn't interested really in our culture and seeing what our community offered and seeing how we're flourishing because of the industry next to us. So, so, you know, Neil then went on to Washington, D.C. the next week, and he slagged my community. He described it as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said we're basically committing genocide and all these things, right? And so that pissed me off.

I wrote an article that described Neil's kind of hypocrisy, right? And the article outlined, you know, so Neil had his 33-year-old son, with him on this trip. He, the documentary was basically Neil Young driving this hybrid piece of American badassery across North America. It was a Lincoln Continental, 1960 something Lincoln Continental that he had spent like a million dollars out, outfitting into this, this hybrid vehicle that burned only the cleanest ethanol from one plant in the States, which he had to, of course, get trucked to him

but on diesel burning trucks wherever he drove. So he could drive clean. He had a big entourage, a big, you know, he towed this car mostly behind a diesel burning bus. Did he not find, did he not find any of that remotely? Like, did his brain just shut off to all of that? His brain was shut up. You know, I'll tell you, what I found working with Neil is that these people are highly insulated from reality. They have people around them that are just complete yes men.

I mean, their jobs depend on stroking these guys' egos and, say, and everything they do is right. And yes, you know, that fart smells delicious. You know, like I remember when he got off the plane in, in Fort Mac,

he was checking into the hotel out at the airport. And we kind of had our initial meeting. And we were standing outside and he's like, he's sniffing the air. He's like, do you smell that? Do you smell that? I'm like,

I smell pine trees. He's like, no, no, I smell the oil sands. And the wind was blowing the wrong direction. It was coming from the opposite direction. the oil said. I'm like, no, that's not the noise.

He's like, no, I smell it. I smell death and dying. And his right-hand man, his security is like, yeah, Neil, I smell it too. Yeah, that smells horrific. I'm like, what about these people on? They literally live in an alternate reality from, you know. And so, yeah, I mean,

they're hypocrites. They don't even recognize their own hypocrisy. Or maybe they think that they're doing the best. You know, my whole point was, look, the people in Fort Mac are doing exactly what Neil Young's doing. I mean, Neil Young here, to his credit, he's putting all his energy and time and investment into this green technology, into trying to make the world a little bit better. Great.

Recognize that Fort McMurray is doing exactly the same thing. Yeah, Neil, you have a pretty big carbon emission, but eventually, maybe your technology will take off and over time. time, there'll be less carbon emissions and, and, you know, we'll all be better off for it. Well, guess what? Same thing's happening in Fort Mac. Things are getting more efficient all the time. All these solutions are coming out of Fort McMurray, this carnival, sustainable.

There was a ton of other thing, you know, tailings reclamation, restoring the land to. Well, it's where the industry is. Where industry is, you get all these brilliant people who pop up who create clever solutions. Yeah. To problems, we do. I mean, in fact, in fact, there were, there were these. modules out at the landfill that a company was working on that that harness the methane gas. They were they were basically outfitted sea cans turned into greenhouses that would work in

minus 40 weather that would produce a lot of food by harvesting the methane gas from landfills. And the idea was that these sea cans would be able to be put in in northern climates where they don't get a lot of growing season and and they'd be able to feed communities. And all these things are happening in Fort McMurray, solar power everywhere, all this stuff. And, of course, you know, so, you know, look, yes, we're, we're emitting a lot of CO2, but it's, you could see where this is trending. There's less and less CO2 for each energy unit produced over time. And Neil Young, you're doing the same thing.

You're, you're producing a lot of CO2 in this traveling carnival. You've got this diesel burning bus. You're shipping this clean fuel, but with diesel burning. vehicles. Well, it's, it's, it's ridiculous to him. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, if, if, if you want to fix things, fix your own backyard. Right.

Don't go traveling across the world on a big show. Right. Bring everything with you to point the finger at somebody else in, you know, I would say all the industry leaders, you know, we're the, the, the cleanest, most advanced in this world, you know, on the planet. Everybody wants our technology. What we're doing. They want our minds.

because we face the stiffest regulations under the sun. Right, right. And so here, so in this article, I was basically writing. And so Neil Young had his son on this bus. His 33-year-old son. He had cystic fibrosis, you know, his life expectancy was about 16 years or something like that. But Neil Young was able to provide for him around the clock nursing care, all the best medical technology to the point where his son was living a flourishing life,

following his dad on this amazing trip across North America. And, you know, I pointed out in the article that that Neil is undermining the very thing that is keeping his son alive. I mean, his son's health and longevity could be linked in a causal chain back to the dirty smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution, allowing for people to be far more productive, allowing for people to be able to make millions of dollars making noise, making sounds with their instrument and their vocal cords. And all that is because of the enormous productivity

and human flourishing and health and increased sanitation and protection from the climate, all these things that the Industrial Revolution and energy, particularly fossil fuels, have provided. And so here, Neil is, it seemed to me, undercutting the very thing that was keeping his son alive, which I felt was ridiculous. So I wrote this article, kind of outlining Neal's hypocrisy.

And, you know, I thought it was fairly well balanced. And it was, you know, complementary where it needed to be and critical where it needed to be. And it got picked up by the Huffington Post of all places. And they asked to publish the article. And I'm like, sure, I can't believe the Huffington Post is picking us up. But by all means, you people are probably the ones that need to hear this more than anyone. Anyways, the article went viral. And so pretty soon I was getting all this media attention,

Sun News at the time and Ezra Levant had me on and a bunch of different other places. So I gained all this attention all of a sudden. And some folks from the political realm noticed that, hey, this guy's pretty well spoken. He can communicate well. He seems to have a robust argument for free market and fossil.

fuels and all these things. And so I have your hair and you're not missing six teeth and all those, right, right. Sure. Fair. Fair enough. Fair enough. So, yeah. So, so, so, you know, I started being kind of headhunted by political parties.

And, you know, the libertarians are really reaching out to me. You know, the libertarian party has been around since the early 70s, around 73. And, you know, I'm a libertarian, so I subscribe to them. But I pointed out to them, I said, look, I said, I'll, I'll, I'll, refer you to this article I wrote before about why engaging in political action and voting is probably immoral. And, you know, I'm not getting involved in politics. Forget about it. Screw off. But they kept coming back at me and they kept making arguments like, you know, the argument I ultimately couldn't refute was that, you know, one of my heroes is, is a politician named

Ron Paul from the U.S. and Ron Paul was a Republican, but he was a hardcore libertarian as well. In fact, he had ran as a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. And then he ran in the primaries for the Republican Party a couple times. And I mean, he stood up on that stage and said stuff like, we ought to end all the wars, bring all the troops home. Our army is for defending our borders and defending our nation, and not engaging in imperialism and nation building and increasing terrorism and doing all these things.

And he pointed out that 9-11 is blowback for American foreign policy. and that we just minded our own business, you know, different things like that, stuff that a Republican at the time wouldn't dare dare speak out, right? And he would even say to, you know, Republican audiences in, like, the Bible Belt, in the southern states,

that, yeah, drugs ought to be legalized. We ought to end the drug war now. How many of you here, raise your hands, would do heroin if it was legal? And he was winning audiences over, with this radical message. And he talked about ending the Federal Reserve and all the evils.

So Dr. Paul, you know, even though he didn't win, you know, he was a congressman for years and he was very principled and would just said very unpopular things as a congressman, but true things, things that needed to be said. Now, he didn't get any of his political agenda advanced. He didn't become president.

He didn't end the Federal Reserve. He didn't get the troops home. You know, the drug war didn't end. He didn't end taxation. None of these things ended because of his political act. But what did happen was he reached millions and millions of people with this message of liberty. And I couldn't deny that. And they said, Tim, look, you are out there.

You've got a blog. You appear on podcasts. Seems to me you're trying to get this message out there. You think that's important. You think that maybe changing culture and promoting these ideas is important. Well, what better thing to do? then stand on a stage where there's a spotlight, where there's an audience who are

who are captive and wanting to hear your message, why wouldn't you stand on that stage and deliver that message? Yeah, you're not going to win an election. You're not going to become prime minister, but look, at least you could do is stand up on that stage and deliver the message. And we think you're a good communicator. So why don't you do that?

And I couldn't argue with that because I believe Dr. Paul was a force for good in the world and he got a message out there saying, unpopular but true things. And yeah, he is, his, you know, the politics, he didn't get things done, but I mean, no, no politician does really, you know, they maintain status quo and grow the state a little bit at best. But they, they send a message to the people. So, so I said, okay, in 2015, I will run for parliament.

That gives me about a year and a half to figure this out, to figure out exactly how to do to start making some connections and start building up network. works and different things. Well, two days after I made this commitment, my member of parliament, who was Brian Jean at the time, stepped down, resigned, and there was a pending by-election. And so within two days, I found myself running for member of parliament in a by-election. And I had no idea what I was doing at all. You know, I reached out to a few people to see if anyone could help me. You know, a guy came from Ontario to be my campaign. manager. He said he was a poker player and he heard that the poker tables in Fort Mac were pretty

hot. He was going to flee some oilmen of their earnings at night while running my campaign during the day. So that so he helped me out. And, you know, I just had this kid and this other kid. Turns out it was a kid. I didn't know it at the time. He was like 15 year old, helping me make memes, which were kind of a new thing in 2014. And we just threw a bunch, a bunch of memes out there. And the one that really stuck was, I want gay married couples to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns.

And that got put around the world. You know, Fox News had me on. CNN did a story about it. This hour is 22 minutes. Did a bit making fun of it. And so I was getting all this attention out of nowhere. Again, just, you know, things seem to be all, the spotlight seemed to be pointing at me.

And again, without any kind of intention of never wanting to ever have been involved in politics, I pretty soon found myself on this political stage with all this attention. And our party convention just happened to be coming up in a month. I was nominated for a leader and won almost unanimously. And so I went from talking about how voting is immoral to running for prime minister. or in very short order. So it was kind of a surreal turn of events. So, you know, in 2015 was the general election,

and I cashed in my retirement savings, my LAPP, which probably wasn't a very smart financial move by any stretch, but work wouldn't give me a leave of absence. So, you know, I was an acting battalion chief in Fort Mac, which is about as high as you can go on the floor side. And so I basically killed my career, cashed in my pension and gave it my best shot in 2015. And we had our best year in the party history,

which isn't saying a lot. But I mean, it felt pretty good knowing how many people, how much we got the word out there. And it gave us, it gave us an opportunity to kind of change the political climate. Because shortly after, when Stephen Harper stepped down, and we saw Max Bernier, saying some vaguely libertarian things in parliament,

we thought, well, this is the guy that should be leading the conservative party. We should have at least a somewhat libertarian guy as leader of the conservative party because then it'll make our radical message seem far less radical. You know, we'll be, because this is what happens all the time, right? Sean, you have, it's not Trudeau that's really driving this progressive agenda. all the radicals to the left of him that are doing that. It's the Green Party, the NDP and the radicals in the media and institution that are shifting the Overton window to the left and making Trudeau look like a moderate with his policies.

While we needed something like that pulling the Overton window the other way, saying, hey, you know, we say end the income tax. Well, now it looks like a modern, you know, if we're on that, that national debate saying we need to end the income tax, we need to, you know, end the Federal Reserve or end the Bank of Canada, all these different things.

When Max Bernier stands on that stage and says, hey, maybe we should have a 10% flat tax. Then that sound better, hey, maybe we should audit the Bank of Canada and put some spotlight on it. Suddenly those positions seem like middle of the road positions, whereas right now they seem like extremist position.

So our idea was to get Max Bernier as leader of the conservative party when Harper stepped down. So we flew Max out to Calgary. We connected him with a bunch of influencers and bigwigs and money and wanted to show him that he'd have all sorts of support from Western Canada. If he threw his name in the hat, we started a campaign called draft Bernier. And shortly after we flew him to Calgary and assured him of all the support, he threw his name. in the ring and almost one almost one uh but out of that came the ppc which has you know max has given max a platform to to promote somewhat libertarian ideas i mean he he he was doing the best job um out of all the politicians out there pushing back against the covid regime and you know

we like to take some credit for that because we kind of paved the way for this libertarian these libertarian ideas to get out there show that they could be popular show that that that, you know, you could get some support behind it. So that was kind of, you know, that's kind of my political history in a nutshell. Now, you know, the downside of it was that the PPC took a lot of wind out of the libertarian sales. A lot of people that normally would have supported our party kind of went over to the PPC because of how charismatic and popular Max was and all the stuff he was doing. And of course, I couldn't match that.

I had bills to pay. I was back at work trying to rebuild that pension. I was in a career politician with a secured pension or anything like that. So I stepped down as leader a couple of years ago. But in that time, I've also kept my foot in the game, you know, when the branch COVIDians started threatening a lot of my colleagues with these Vax mandates and a bunch of them were threatening to lose their job. I got together with a few people started an organization called Fight for the Front Line.

I think you had Kate King on. She was part of that. And, you know, we launched a constitutional challenge with, Derek from and put enough pressure, raised enough public awareness that we eventually got, you know, in conjunction with some other organizations work in parallel and activists. We put enough pressure on the political government to get them to back down and get all the health care workers back and my firefighter colleagues back. So that's kind of what I've been up to lately. Well, that's a lot. Now, I'm going to try and slow you down a second.

Yeah, yeah. I'm rattling off questions, but I wanted to let you finish. So here, let's start here. You say voting is immoral. Right. Can you expand on that? I'm just curious, you said very early on, you wrote a whole thing about it and then you get wrapped up into politics. I'm curious, why is voting immoral?

Well, it's kind of like inciting violence, right? Because most people who are voting are asking the government to do something. They're asking them to impose something, right? Some policy. All these policies are backed by lethal force. I mean, all you have to do is disobey any government policy and defend yourself from the enforcers that come to enforce that policy and you'll get guns drawn on you. If you fight back and draw your gun back, I mean, you'll get shot down, right? And so all government, you know, government is a monopoly on violence and that's its mandate.

And so when you when you say things like, you know, we need to or you need to pay your taxes, okay, well, what happens if I don't? well, I get a bunch of threatening letters in the mail. They might garnish my wage. If I hide my money, you know, they'll eventually try to come take it. They'll, they'll try to restrict my freedom in all sorts of ways. And if I fight back, if I say no, I'm going to go ahead and be free anyways, you know, they'll keep escalating force until they get compliance. I mean, laws are not suggestions.

They're mandatory precisely because they're backed by lethal force. And so to me, anytime you're. you're asking the government to do something on your behalf, you're kind of encouraging them or inciting them to do violence. And voting, you know, unless you're voting libertarian, I guess, is at least this is how I looked at it back then. I still look at it this way a little bit,

but I can also make a case for voting in self-defense, right? I mean, if you're facing a socialist regime like the NDP and it looks like they're going to sweep the vote, I mean, maybe picking the lesser evil is is defending yourself against a greater evil. So, so, you know, I have more sympathy for voting nowadays, but that's kind of how I looked at it back then. Would you have suggestions on what to do otherwise of voting that? Well, look, I think that, I think that Bright Bart was right when he said that politics is downstream from culture,

or government is downstream from culture. In other words, what was the quote by H.L. Minkin? He said, democracy is the idea that the common man knows what he wants and gets it good and hard. And, you know, the reason we have, let's say, government-run health care in this country isn't because Trudeau says we should have it. It's because my neighbor says we should have it. You know, most Canadians say, yeah, this is something I want. And government follows market demand. Now, government plays a role in promoting these ideas.

But ultimately, if the population didn't want something, it wouldn't happen. If they didn't want it strong enough, let's say, it wouldn't happen. And so to me, politics is downstream from culture. And so the most important thing we can do is shift culture. And shifting culture requires persuading people, engaging with them. and getting good at influencing people. And in a lot of ways, engaging in politics is almost antithetical to that. Because your job, when you're running as a candidate,

if you're serious about it and you want to get votes and you want to attain that seat, is you have to reflect and even amplify culture, you have to foment a little bit of fear, you have to talk about how you're going to be the solution to the problem. And that is, you know, the exact opposite of what we need. We need to explain to people why their ideas are wrong, why this culture is wrong, why, you know, and those, doing that kind of thing isn't likely to get you elected, but that's what's required if we expect a market that demands a smaller government. And, and so, you know, as soon as you get, like, I was under no illusions. If I were to become, through some fluke, elected to as prime minister,

I was under no delusions that I would actually be able to do anything. I mean, politicians are chained down by the Overton window, which is culture and all the institutions and the, you know, the entrenched bureaucrats. Those things all dramatically restrain what you can actually do when you get elected. And quite often, the things, you say to get elected are putting on chain are they're essentially you putting on your own chains and creating your own constraints uh when you actually get into office um and and so it's a very difficult role now that being said obviously we need politicians you know to get ahead of the parade we create

to fill that gap um you know i'd rather have a libertarian politician who is having to you know like I prefer to have Daniel Smith in there, even though, yeah, in order to be pragmatic, she has to spend a lot of money and increase the debt and, you know, engage in all these public funding of infrastructure and arenas and different things like that. I know she's a libertarian and I know she, you know, wants the same things I do, but is constrained by the realities and the pragmatism of politics. So is that why, I'm just going to get a thought out of my brain, I'll let you tackle it. Is that why then maybe right now with the liberal government and the NDP propping and the fact that media is funded by the government and institutions lean heavily to the left and we have all these rules coming down that we, you know, if, feels like the Overton window, to use your terms, is being pushed hard right now.

Like, I mean, everything that goes against what they're talking about, silence, because they have control over so much. And it's, it's, you know, normally I'd say a politician is hamstrung. I get what everything you're saying, but right now in this country, it feels completely opposite. It feels like they have been able to just continue to march down their agenda and continue to just force it. and not have any backlash. Well, because this is something the left has always understood, right?

Is that propaganda and is important because it influences culture. And culture is what allows you to impose your mandate. And so that's what they're doing. We don't have the same type of understanding or drive on the other side of things, on the liberty side, let's say. And yeah, I mean, you know, and you see this over and over again. this is why, you know, Michael Malice said, you know, conservatives are just progressives driving the speed limit.

You know, the conservative party is considered conservative because it has the same policies the liberals did 10 years ago, right? And in 10 years from now, what the status quo is now is what the conservatives will be fighting for, right? And so, you know, they're either impotent or complicit in creating this, but either way, they're powerless to kind of stop the march forward. And so it's up to people, I think, who aren't trying at all costs to get elected. And, you know, this is a thing that happens.

And we see this over and over again with the Conservative Party. And this is my worry, for example, with the PPC, is that, you know, if they water down the message enough that they start getting support, right? And we know that, let's assume Max is a libertarian for a second. I have no reason to believe that he's not really. I mean, you know, I know some people inside the campaign that worked long and hard on a drug legalization policy, for example, that he could have easily promoted, or a marijuana one. It was a very mediocre one. Now, he refused to do that.

Why did he refuse to do that? Well, because it probably wouldn't be popular with his base, right? So even though he might want to advance this agenda, he knows that he's going to lose a bunch of support if he tries to. And down the line, you could see where he softens the message of libertarianism to try and gain more support. Now, I think this is a mistake because let's say he starts gaining a lot of popularity. Let's say that they take enough of the conservative vote that the right wing is fractured like it was in the 90s when the Reform Party emerged. and you now have this divide.

Well, what's going to happen with conservatives when they see that the left is dominating because they can't unite the vote, there's going to be a big push to reunite the parties, right? And so if Max wants to become prime minister someday, he's going to have to unite the conservatives under this more status quo message because if he continues with even the message he has now,

it's going to turn off a lot of people that would otherwise vote, vote for him. So, so the system that the system itself promotes, um, you know, if you want that seat, you have to, uh, you can't go against the status quo. But they won't even let him go against the status quo to it. Right. Tim. Like he had like, think about Max last election. He literally had enough, he was hired than the Greens. Um, you had a guy on stage at the leaders, uh, debate that publicly States, I don't want to be prime minister. That's Quebec. I mean, I sit here and I go like, you know, we sit here and say you have to do this, you have to do that. It's like, no, the system

enforces that. I'm not so sure it's what the people want. I would like to hear Max get up on the stage and say whatever the hell he wants to say. And if he's got enough of the popular vote, which he did at the time, to be there, but they didn't put him on stage. So how is he going to gain more recognition when the most, well, I mean, that's where people went to watch. The leaders debate, they don't allow them on. Yeah. Now, and once again, I would use this for you too, right? If the Libertarian Party was higher than the Greens, why have the Greens on the stage?

Right. Because they're fixing it. That's the way my eyes look. Yeah. Well, yeah, I agree. And, you know, I think that Max is challenging the narrative enough. that they don't want any part of that on that stage. So the establishment is fighting back.

I mean, there's just too many powerful interests, interested in stopping that, right? And this is my point, my point though, is that, look, you are either, like, from my perspective, I would prefer Max have taken my offer.

I mean, right after he lost to Andrew Shear in the leadership race for the CPC, I reached out to him and did a public video. and said, hey, I'll step down as leader of the Libertarian Party if you want to actually have a group of people that will support your policies. And in fact, if you don't, I'll take your policies and I'll run against the conservatives on them in the next election and how are you like that. So, you know, we talked over the years and he kind of hummed and hawed and was kind of

hoping he could get somewhere with the CPC. And eventually he started his own party, which was kind of a head scratcher to me. But I think, you know, the reason he did it was that he could get more popular support if he were to take a populist message that, you know, and kind of water down the libertarian message, not be so radical. But I would prefer to see a radical max. Like, yeah, Max, come out. Income taxes, theft, God damn it.

Just say it on stage. The drug war ought to end. No one should be able to tell me what I can. I can't put into my body. You know this. Say this on stage. The central bank ought to end. Say it. Say we ought to end all foreign excursions.

Bring all the Canadian troops home and say, no more peacekeeping, no more excursions. Defend our borders. That's it. That's what the, you know, the military is there to do. It's to defend Canadians, not special interests overseas. And, you know, that would have been something special. Now, he would have, wouldn't have got many, you know, he definitely wouldn't have been prime minister. But he would have ignited, he would have ignited the, minds of Canadians, I think, if he did that. And, and, you know, like, if you're going to put up libertarian numbers in an election, you might as well go all in on, on the radical libertarian stuff

rather than this other stuff, right? So, you know, I guess that's my perspective on it, but, but I don't know, maybe, maybe he's doing the right things. Hey, Tim, I'm just a guy from the middle of nowhere who has a podcast, you know, and I just look at, I just, I would just love to hear the thoughts, right? And then if you're going to say something that's radical, well, why? And then I would love to hear that explain because I'd like to become what I believe is an informed voter. I think a lot of us. And when you control it, so you actually don't get to see who's actually out there and how popular they've become, well, that's fixing the election. I mean, it's just so blatant in front of me. I'm just like, this is, this makes zero sense. I mean,

literally, I can't even think of his name right now. I'm choking on rage a little bit here. the leader of the block literally says on stage I don't even want to be prime minister it's like yeah it's a mockery of a national debate and I'm not make it it's up to him to say that I'm happy he said it but I mean why even have them there other than you understand that you know there's a large population that lives in Quebec and you know they they obviously have their big place in Canada and here we sit in Alberta I mean it's just it's interesting for me being a newbie to politics and certainly doing a deep dive over the last years since you know interviewing a whole bunch of the UCP here in Alberta and

everything else and being on stage with them and everybody think I'm a political junkie which I'm not I'm just just a guy who cares just like everybody else in the last couple of years have really shone the spotlight on a lot of things where you're like holy crap what is going on and it's hard it's easy for people to get including myself to go down a little bit of a conspiracy rabbit hole when you start staring at like, what are we doing? Like if Trudeau can't win or the conservatives can't win because PPC get up there and everybody loves them, I mean, to me, that's where I'm like, well, that's what people want.

I want to open and transparent, but it doesn't feel like that. I probably sound like a little bit of a, I'm off and Never Neverland when it comes to the political sphere. But that's, that's, well, I mean, I think most Canadians think like that, right? They're just like, yeah, let's just have open, honest communication and debate. You know, part of the problem is, though, that we're surrounded by this matrix of propaganda. And, you know, you don't need to, you don't need to, you know, it's even scarier from my perspective that it's probably not puppet master somewhere controlling the strings. This is probably just an emergent property of the system we have. So, for example, you just have to look at local elections or local politicians.

right? You know, you live in your community, you see a real need in your community for a change. Maybe potholes need to be fixed. Maybe you have a big idea about how emergency services should be run in your community. You get elected on that platform and you try to implement your policy. What do you run up against? You run up against the CFOs and the CFOs and the directors that have worked in that municipality for years explaining to you exactly why this is a naive and wrong-headed way to go and how that'll never work and how this unintended consequence and that unintended consequence will be the result and who are you to argue right i mean these guys are the experts this is you could call them the deep state or the entrenched bureaucracy whatever you want to call them

they're just guys that have done the job and can see the problems with your pie in the sky ideas and so you know this is one of the reasons why campaign promises generally never come to fruition because they meet the hard, cold reality of the entrenched bureaucrats. And, you know, if you do get anywhere, eventually one of these bureaucrats is going to go to the public, vis-a-vis maybe the corporate media or legacy media, and explain how dangerous this policy is and what it'll mean for constituents if it's implemented. And so, you know, the system itself rigs is rigged against the people. Of course it is. I mean, you know, governments aren't, you know, there's this, I think this

myth out there that governments kind of emerge from this amazing process of people coming together and deciding what's right and deciding self-government and creating a, no, it's, governments are almost always born in plunder and conquest and that's kind of their job and that's what they continue doing. And, you know, you can't take a group of people who, use violence to to you know i mean they're they're essentially like the crips and the bloods it's like this is our territory that's your territory don't cross this line that's where the border will be we're gonna we're gonna provide protection and and shake down people for protection money on this side you you do run your scam on the other side we can't expect that group of individuals to be for the

people or by the people or something like that so you know i i just don't see how we how we can expect, I guess, the system to work for us. It never has and it never will. And so I think we have to operate outside the system, around the system, in the gaps that the system leaves.

And I think that's where the real change happens anyways. I mean, we see it over and over again in history. I mean, slavery was ended in most of the world peacefully. It was only in the states that they went, they had a civil war about it. But it was through the spreading of ideas and radical abolition, radical abolitionists going against the common, you know, ingrained culture at the time that did. It was a small group of people that were just principled and steadfast that changed it.

Same thing, you know, Soviet Union. I mean, we saw that change very rapidly when these giant systems of control and authoritarianism crumbled under their own weight. And, you know, I think there's room for optimism. but I don't think the optimism is going to come from getting our one true desired leader in that office and then change is going to come. No, I think it's a lot harder and more complex than that. But also, in some ways, easier than that because it requires us to take personal responsibility for what's going on and try to shift culture in whatever way is available to us. Yeah, I agree with you.

parts in there. Certainly, you can't expect somebody to get in to be leader, take Daniel Smith, and expect her to be the night and shining armor and everything's going to go away. Because if public opinion goes against her, I mean, it's, it's a, you know, it's, oh, what's the word I'm looking for here this morning, folks? It's a popularity contest. So if she gets voted out in May, she could have been raw, raw about all these things, but if she doesn't listen, so I get it. You have to educate yourself. You have to take care of yourself.

You have to take care of your community to help support the people who get in office to do the right things and then have the support when certainly the hailstorm falls on them, etc. Right, and just to go on that example, you know, right now in Alberta, we have an opportunity. I know Daniel Smith would probably love to desecis.

centralized ambulance services again to kick them back to the municipality while she's constrained by a number of things one of those being public opinion and entrenched bureaucrats don't want it i mean mayors and council and municipalities don't want to take that back on i mean the provinces providing it for free why would they want that cost and responsibility on themselves now so daniel smith is constrained here but you know i've been kind of banging my head against the wall trying to convince our union that what we need to do is create a movement of people that want to see this decentralized and It's very easy to do. We did it with the vaccine mandates.

You know, you get people rallied together. You appear on all the media you can. You create a unified message of decentralizing. And pretty soon you shift the political landscape to the point where now Daniel Smith can do what she wants. But she can't do that without us taking personal responsibility for paving the way for him. That's an interesting thought because, you know, I think on this. side. Anytime you centralize all the power, I mean, we just, we just literally felt how that felt. That sucked. I mean, we've been living that for, you know, and being out of the rural parts of Alberta,

certainly there's been the stories, you know, you brought up Kate King, but there's been others who have talked about issues with not only hospitals, but paramedics, ambulances, and a whole bunch of that and it comes back to a lot of the centralization or the barricercy that's been formed from the top down approach and although there might have been once upon a time a carrot there that was that seemed really good now it seems like it's completely opposite I feel like you'd you'd have a lot of support for what you're saying I feel like there's a ton of people maybe already working on it and here you're you talk about it Tim they'll be like yes that makes a lot of sense that's me at least Well, no, I think you're right.

I mean, I think it needs to be a little bit organized and, I mean, you need to understand what the enemy is going to come back with, right? I mean, they're going to come back with while people, you know, in underserved communities aren't going to have services. You know, there's going to be a difference in protocols and equipment. And, you know, they'll go down the list and explain how this is going to put people's lives in jeopardy. So you have to be ready for those things. But I mean, right now the system is an absolute gong show. It's, you know, at one time there was something like 60% of full-time paramedics in Edmonton were off on stress leave. You know, they're getting paid to stay home rather than be out there.

And this puts an incredible strain on the system. And why were they off on stress leave? Well, it wasn't because they were seeing dead people or overwhelmed by COVID. It was because the COVID regime makes working an absolute nightmare in a toxic place. and the system treats you like an object of compliance rather than as a clinical practitioner exercising your best clinical judgment in the service of your patient, it's not a good place to work.

And so, you know, all these messages need to be kind of packaged in a concise form that's powerful that cuts out the arguments of the enemy and makes it very easy for the public to understand. And if that were to happen, And, you know, we could maybe pave the way for Daniel Smith, but none of that works really being done right now. I'm curious, you know, I'd written down all these questions. One of them that, you know, I'm really, well, I'll read you back something you said. And I paraphrase it, so I probably got it a little bit wrong.

But when AHS takes over, you mentioned talking to people, raising, you know, beating the drum, trying to warn people what this could mean and where this was going to head and everything. else. What were people's response back then? Well, I mean, a lot of people were, we're agreeing like, oh, that doesn't sound good. Yeah, it should stay in the, in the community. But okay, well, what are you going to do about it? Well, I, you know, kids got hockey tonight. I got a date night plan. I got, you know, Netflix is. I got a binge watch something. You know, this is the problem with a lot of this, right? It's, it's kind of public choice theory explains this, right?

It explains, so for example, with supply management, you know, you or I pay an extra $2 or maybe $20 a year for dairy because of supply management. I don't know what it is, but it's not a huge amount. It doesn't, we don't notice it in our pocketbooks, but it's kind of annoying to have to pay more and not have more options. But we're not going to go march on Ottawa and demand that, that Ottawa save us $20 a year and give us more options in the dairy aisle. On the other hand, if they threaten to remove supply management, you can bet you're asked the dairy farmers will be driving their tractors in a convoy, dumping manure on front lawns, making a stink, explaining to people, you know, engaging in a propaganda campaign,

explaining why this, you know, opening up the dairy market is dangerous and a threat to Canadians. So special interests have, you know, will fight tooth and nail because they stand to lose a huge amount. Meanwhile, you know, we lose a little bit and we don't really notice the loss. And so it's death by a thousand cuts, right? It's a very slow death and then it's a very, and then it happens very quickly when at a certain point you've lost enough blood that you die quick. But that's how Liberty goes away. It's death by a thousand cuts. It's not one big sword through the heart kind of thing. And so, you know, yeah, with the AHS thing, it's just, again, people, you know, at the end of the day, how much are you going to notice? You know, how often do you call the ambulance? You know,

how often do you call for emergency services? Not that often. And when you do, regardless of what system is in place, someone will probably show up. And maybe that, maybe it won't be as ideal as should be, but how do you then get people to, whether it's pay attention or whether it's to get them to engage with something that, you know, will affect all of us at some point. Like, I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know, like, it's just inevitable. If you're in Alberta, AHS, you're going to deal with them at some point. Like, I mean, that goes without saying.

How do you get people, is it, is it propaganda? Is it a coordinated media, you know, strike? I'm using, anyways, you get the point. Yeah, well, I think, I think it's, it's all of that. And, and, you know, one of the things I found is that, um, stories help more than anything, right? I mean, was it Stalin who said a million dead is a stat? One dead is a tragedy. And, you know, that's kind of how people look at it.

Like you put a name in a face to a tragedy. It really drives it home. Whereas if you just say 20 people died in a car wreck, you think that's terrible. But if you see that child's face and that individual and hear their story, it really humanizes it. Right. And so at this point, we've got all sorts of. of stories of tragedy in this system that can be talked about.

And I think it's incumbent to get those stories out. You know, part of the problem, of course, is that H.S, you know, basically has a non-disclosure agreement with practitioners that they're not allowed to talk about that stuff. But, you know, there are ways around that. You find people who are willing to talk that don't work for HHS and that sort of thing. so. Well, you know, we've been talking through some different things and I want to talk, you know,

you sent me the article. I read the article. It was fantastic. And I've had Rupa Suburama an before to talk about made and medically assisted suicide. And, you know, to jump from one, one topic to the next, I just, you know, I don't want to, well, I do enjoy sitting here and talking for the rest of the day. I got no problem. I think the listeners know that by now.

But, you know, you wrote an article about this. And, well, I don't know. I'm curious, I was saying to you before we started, and I kind of set it right off the hop. Like, it was a very balanced take on this that as it goes along, you realize how dangerous it could become. Yeah.

And I was wondering, well, maybe you could share some thoughts. You seem to have, well, pretty good grasp on the, system, you know, with your background. And then, of course, you know, politics meets, you know, paramedic, firefighter, you know, you got your podcast, everything else, you write, and your writing is, I shared it on Twitter, actually, before I came on, because I'm like, people probably actually read this. This is actually very, like, very, very, very balanced on how a take on this is, on someone's right to do this, except this is where it's leading to.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is the problem is, you know, I don't have any pragmatic solutions to this. I want to raise the issues that are happening when you have the state running, administering a program called assisted suicide. You know, I, you know, I remember the Sue Rodriguez case from the 90s, kind of split the nation about this topic of assisted suicide. By the end of the day, you could see. this lady was clearly suffering. You know, she was to the point where she couldn't swallow.

Her life was excruciating and painful. She was going to die in a few months anyways. So why not let her die on her own terms, you know, or at least why criminalize people that would help her die on her own terms? That seemed to be a bridge too far. And so, you know, I'm very kind of. of, you know, as a libertarian, you own yourself. You should be able to do what you want with yourself.

You know, if you want to engage in behaviors that are unhealthy, you know, staying up too late, drinking, you know, engaging in drug use or just, you know, doing those kinds of things. I don't think that's great, but I don't, I wouldn't use lethal force to stop you from, from making bad decisions. And honestly, I think that a libertarian society becomes a much more socially conservative of society because you can't outsource the cost of your vice to society in general like you can now. Right now, if you are making bad decisions, you've got this very easy and comfortable safety net,

no questions asked, whereas in a more libertarian society, while you would be relying on charity or family members or something like that, and they generally say, look, you've got to get your act together will help you out but you know so so there's a lot more and what do you and sorry in society day what are you talking about specifically that basically becomes a crutch for them oh well so so you have um unending medical care right so you know look as a paramedic i see the same people over and over again i'm administering them narcan um it's become to the point now where where people feel safe injecting an unknown substance into their blood or snorting an unknown substance because they know nearby the government will provide them with Narcan that will that will stop

them from overdosing. And so people are taking more and more risks and engaging more debauchery, let's say, because that safety net is there. Health care, you name it, right? It's like there's no incentive to take personal responsibility because the government just provides. I mean, you could go down the list of things. Even I see it all the time in my profession. We get calls for a house on fire. 911. This house is on fire.

Okay, how many people are in the house? Oh, I don't know. I was just driving by, but you should send fire trucks. And so you race across town. You send, you know, two or three stations full of fire trucks to this burning down house to find that it's the reflection of a sun. It's setting sun in the window or something like that. And again, what, so why?

why didn't that person stop, knock on the door and do the, you know, what a responsible person would do and ask people to get out of the house? Well, because there's a government department that will take care of that. So we've outsourced our personal responsibility in all sorts of ways to the government. My neighbor falls on hard times, is having difficulty putting food on the table. I just shrug and say, well, there's a government department that will take care of that. I don't feel any sense of duty to help them out, fight them over. Again, I feel like this outsourcing of responsibility to the government has essentially atomized us in our houses and destroyed communities and of course destroyed families. I can get divorced without fault, right?

Even if I cheat on or if my wife cheats or I cheat, you know, it's a no-fault divorce. So, you know, the women can exit marriages with no repercussions. I can take the kid, strip fathers of, there's no personal responsibility for your part of breaking up that marriage, of cheating, of breaking your marital vows, different things like that. You can go through every aspect of society and see where personal responsibility has been outsourced to the government. And, you know, this. And so you can expect when your personal responsibility for your mistakes and your sins and your vices is outsource to the government, well, you're going to do a lot more of those kinds of things. And so society becomes much more debauchous, in my opinion, when you have more and more government involved in it. Whereas if I'm committing vice and doing things that are literally creating hell on earth for me, you know, I'm going to have to find my way out of that myself.

if it's a libertarian society or I and I'm at least going to have to ask for help. Maybe I'll get some help. But again, I'm going to have to take the personal responsibility to ask for help and to placate the people that are helping me that, yeah, I am sincerely on the road out of hell and working towards getting back into, you know, good graces here to maintain that. So I think you'd see a lot less, a lot less vice, even though it would be legal in a libertarian society. So that's,

that's what I mean by, does that kind of help answer your question? Yeah, yeah, it does. When I, when I, Tim,

I go, do you see brighter days in the future then? Or are you like, we, because you know, like, the whole thing about

a sister, bringing him back to assist suicide is what I've watched is, and when I, the timeline, it's just, it's just, as soon as the door got open,

it's just a slippery slope, right? Like now, now you got mental illness, right? You got, you don't need to have terminally ill conditions where, and I'm butchering it here and you can do a better job of it. And I've read a little bit about mature minors at some point. And you go like, where are we going? Like, we're just going to, if you're having a bad day, you can get it. Is that where we're going?

And then, you know, pack onto that. the fact that I read in your article about the organ donation, I'm going to read it off here so I don't screw this up. Nova Scotia recently became the first province in Canada to adopt presumed consent organ donation. This means that unless you explicitly opt out of organ donation, the state of your organs after you die, which I have a million thoughts about,

but when you tack it on to assisted suicide, when you tack it on to all these different things, you're like, this is getting dangerous. Right, right. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the dangers of the state running this program. So, you know, if you believe like I, even if you believe like I do that a person should have the right to end their suffering and even get help doing that, you have to have serious concerns about the state running this program. And, you know, there are a number of reasons for that. I mean, the first thing is that the incentives are all wrong for us as health care. workers, right? So as a state employee, my job is to produce paperwork or data for the state. Some might say, might think my job is saving lives and patient care. But no, the state really doesn't care about that. They only care about the paperwork I produce. That is what I'm judged on. That is what ensures I don't get fired. I don't get promotions or extra money or opportunity

because I provided excellent patient care or because I have really good patient outcomes or because my patients give really good feedback and write letters to my boss, I get judged based on kind of arbitrary metrics in this PCR. Did I get out of the shoot fast enough? You know, did I get out of the hall fast enough? Or, you know, did I dot all my eyes and cross all my T's? Did I get this piece of data or that piece of data? And they need this data in order to.

to redistribute funds to entrench their power within the bureaucracy, to make the case that they need more power to operate things because look at this stat, look at that stat. And so that's my job. And so my point here is that patient care actually gets in the way of me doing my job. I've got 30 or 40 minutes worth of paperwork to do for the state on each call I do. And when my patient says I'm in pain or can you do this or can you do that, well, now I have to put my paperwork down and go do this annoying thing. And, you know, so again, my, do this annoying thing.

Right, right. Exactly. Exactly. It's become perverted, right? And, and like, this is a beautiful profession. Healthcare work is one of the most fulfilling things you can do. We all got into this because we love helping people, seeing a difference, you know, restoring order to the chaos that is occurring in this emergency.

That all, that's the stuff that gets us up. and why we got into this. And to have our job reduced to, I got to produce this paperwork or I'm going to get in trouble is perverse, right? And it gets in the way of me doing all the things that bring me joy, which is helping people, providing maximum value to people. And so now it's gotten to the point where, you know, the incentive is to do as little work as possible because that's how you get ahead.

I can't make more money. I can't get any benefit. at all other than maybe, you know, it feels good when the patient says thank you or writes a letter. Yeah, that feels good. But at the end of the day, you know, I'm better off when I see fewer patients and when I do less work. And this is why you see paramedics hanging out in ambulance bays after they drop a patient off being like, oh, man, I don't want to go out there again and have to be subjected to another four-hour hospital hallway wait and dealing with grumpy nurses and administrators and this and that, the next thing.

It's not the patients that we don't want to provide care for. It's all the rest of the stuff that we're trying to get away from, right? And so, again, our incentive here is to minimize work rather than maximize value. And so, and this was really highlighted to me in 2017 when my mom was sick. She was, you know, she was sick from what I would call the nocebo effect. You know, the placebo effect is when you have positive beliefs about your health and your body heals. It has real physical manifestations in your body. While the nocebo effect is the exact opposite of that, it's when you have negative beliefs about your health,

and you get physically sick, like legitimately sick, and your organs start shutting down in different things because you have negative beliefs about your health. And it's a very powerful effect, as powerful as the placebo effect, although it's not talked about that much. But doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her, but she was convinced there was something in her abdomen and this and that. So she really needed help switching her psychology from this negative fixation on her health to a positive focus on her health. And the system just couldn't do that, right? The system is not geared to provide that.

I mean, doctors are incentivized to minimize visits to about seven minutes because they can't, you know, they can't provide concierge service like they can, say, in California where, you know, for 700 bucks a month, I'll spend an hour a week with you talking about your health care problems. I'll go to the emerge if you ever show up there. I'll do house calls at any time of night. No, no, they don't, you can't bill for that thing in Alberta. All you can bill for is patient visits and the treatments you provide them. And so your goal is to get as many patients through it in a day as possible. So you can pay off your artificially inflated student loans and all your licensing fees and different things like that. And so seven minutes isn't enough to deal with a case like my mom.

You know, nursing care, when she finished having the surgery, she didn't, need and she was, she was suffering horribly. And her health was spiraling down. She was very high maintenance. She needed a lot of nursing care. And these nurses, I know how it is, because my wife's a nurse, they're stretched thin, following all the policies and procedures, doing all the documentation. They have to write so many notes.

And, you know, the 10th time my mom called the call bell. You know, the nurse took me aside. I could tell she was frazzled and she was like at the end of her ropes in terms of all the work she had to do. And she's like, you know, have you guys considered medically assisted suicide? You know, and I'm like, it really shocked me. It was because my mom was perfectly saveable. She just needed some kind of positive support, some kind of intervention that would get her mind going in the right direction. And the best this nurse could offer is maybe a lethal injection would be the most humane solution here. And of course, that, that, that,

totally deflated my mom. I mean, she's, you know, she was a strong Christian woman, so suicide was off the table for her, but hearing those words was utterly demoralizing, right? And it was, you know, she died within two weeks. And, and again, I don't, I don't put personal responsibility or blame on that nurse who was making the best suggestion in a sense that she could, given the constraints of the system and how it operates. But the system incentivizes minimizing work because it overwhelms you with all this nonsense work when you could be, you know, and it's not just providing good patient care. It's like providing innovative or going that extra mile or maximizing patient care.

You almost get punished for doing that, right? So expecting our health care system to work magic on my mom. was impossible. So that's one thing. And we see this incentive to minimizing work all over the place. You know, for example, one of the things we have in Alberta is called Goals of Care. Now, goals of care are supposed to be, represent a collaborative conversation you have with your family physician about what should happen in the event you're incapacitated.

Do you want CPR? What level of care? And there's about, I think, six or seven different levels of care that can be selected. Now, this document isn't signed by the patient. It's a physician's order. So it's signed by a doctor. Now, at the same time, we have these goals of care. We have also had for years something called advanced directives.

I got to stop you there just for a second. I just want to make sure I got that clear. Goals of care, which deals with if you are incapacitated, nocto, blah, blah, blah, get the point. You're in a rough spot. You haven't signed anything. Just a doctor has signed off on what they're going to do. Right.

Right. And they're, you know, they're supposed to have had a robust conversation with you about this and you, you know, take your wishes into account and all this stuff. But of course, again, we know that doctors minimize, have a minimal amount of time to spend with you. Well, you just said, like, they're trying to ran through as many. And now we've been through COVID and everything else for the last three years where getting into a physician is next to impossible, other than walking clinic. or the emergency room. So who's having these conversations? Right, right.

Well, I'm sure they're having these conversations. I mean, I'm sure there are, but I mean, for a lot of us, they aren't. But, but yeah, again, I've talked to a lot of patients who have this, and they don't understand that this paperwork limits the amount of care I can provide you. And this is something that a lot of them say, oh, I didn't agree to that. I didn't understand that. That's not what I thought. So is this, sorry, Tim, you got me.

Is this like, is this like elderly or is this like everyone? Or is this like across the board, I guess I'm, this could be so standard that maybe I've, I've overlooked it. I just, I've never heard of them before, goals of care. Right. Well, usually, the other word for it is green sleeves because they're kept in a green sleeve with a transparent top and you're supposed to keep it on your fridge. So the doctor will fill out the goals of care, sign it, give it to you, you keep it

on your fridge so that, you know, paramedics can see it. So normally it's only done with people who are in advanced years or have some kind of chronic health condition or terminal condition or something like that. So we see them all the time mostly in assisted living facilities or nursing homes. And these are people who, you know, still a lot of them want, you know, a fairly aggressive medical care.

And they deserve it. And a lot of times aggressive medical care could actually help this person in some of these situations. but yet they have these goals of care, which are, again, a physician's order that they don't understand. And I've always wondered, well, why do we have these goals of care? Because we already have something called advanced directives in Alberta.

We have the advanced directive legislation, which allows anyone you or I to write out, even on a napkin, what we want in the event of incapacitation. It lets you say, I want my wife to be in charge of my healthcare decisions. I don't want CPR or I want, want you to throw the whole operating room at me. You know, I want heroic effort, whatever you want, right? It's like, I want you to put me on ice and thaw me out in a thousand years.

I'm like, no, yeah, you can't do that. But, you know, you can at least say, give people an idea what you want. And then we are protected as healthcare practitioners. If we take that in good faith, we're like, you know, that we're doing what the patient would have wanted. So why do we need these two things? Well, I think a lot of it is because a lot of people don't fill out advanced directives. So the default, if you don't fill it out, is you get the full meal deal.

You get CPR, you get, you know, ventilators, you get, you know, all the things we can throw at you to try to keep you alive. But these goals of care bring it so far the other direction that a lot of people are getting minimal care. And, you know, again, these goals of care are a lot of times informed by nursing home staff, which are, overburdened with work and don't want to do as much work. And so, you know, they authentically believe that they get themselves to authentically believe that this patient wouldn't benefit from from slightly more aggressive care that we ought to do the bare minimum to treat this person in the event that they get ill or incapacitated. Again, just a kind of a demonstration of the things I see every day that highlight this systemic

incentive to minimize work in a sense. So that's one thing that ought to concern us dramatically is that, you know, people that are minimized that have the incentive to minimize work shouldn't be pushing lethal injection on us because that's the ultimate way to minimize my work as a health care provider. Hey, hey, buddy, you're overdosing. You want me to just help you along with a lethal injection here? I won't have to do a, you know, spend time with you and your poopy pants and clean up my ambulance and, you know, do all this other stuff.

You know, I shouldn't be the one pushing that on someone. The next thing is, you know, I heard one of my coworkers not too long ago, since Maid is in the news, you know, we go to suicidal patients all the time. And he's like, well, what are we supposed to do with these people now? Like, are we supposed to offer a mental health or a lethal injection? like what's what's the default and that's a good point it's like what what are how are we supposed to look at these people who are wanting to die attempting suicide we get called for whatever reason i mean you know our our default assumption has always been we intervene uh because this person maybe isn't

in the right mind or you know they're having a mental break or whatever and you know we forcibly can find them if need be until they're in the right mind and and you know or thinking better and have a little bit more optimism. But now it's like, okay, well, if mental illness is going to be one of the requirements or one of the prerequisites that is accepted for enrollment into made, then shouldn't we be offering these people made service? And wouldn't that also decrease the amount of work we have to do if we don't have to deal with this person over and over again with their psychological ailments?

So it sends us a message, it sends a confusing message to health care workers about what we're, and I suspect this is exactly what happened in the case of that veterans, a fair person who kept telling all those veterans that made services available. That guy probably thought he was doing them a favor by outlining all the different options available for them. While people who are at the end of their rope don't need to be told that death is an option, they need to be given every reason. to hope for a brighter tomorrow that they can get.

Not like, hey, we can help you out with that suicide if you want. You don't need to do it yourself. We'll do it in a much more humane way. So, you know, you can't tell me that there aren't going to be burnt out healthcare practitioners who aren't going to be taking every opportunity to whisper to their hopeless cases that made exists and explaining to them how they can enroll in it. And that's a real problem. I mean, look at the growth in medically assisted suicides in Canada.

I think the first year it was 1,000 by 2021. I don't know if I've seen 22 statistics, but 2021 is 10 grand, I believe. Yeah, we're up to a total of about 33,000 deaths now, yeah. So, so like, you know, and then you tack on, you know, you talk about the mental health side of it. And all, I say this all the time. You know, I wasn't a guy that put a whole lot of thought into that. Not saying people had bleeding hearts or whatever, Tim. I just didn't get it.

And then I had my own mental health moment in the middle of COVID. And you go, oh, oh, okay, I get it now. So, you know, when you talk about maybe this person just isn't in their right mind, we're probably seeing more of that than ever before. You probably have an interesting insight in this. because of your background. I mean, like, segregating people against different parts of the population that filtered all the way down to the family unit has been a drastic or dangerous or whatever bloody we're trying to spit out here this morning, folks. The old tongue at times doesn't want to work.

But it's like what we've done now has fractured the family unit, which in turn fractured the family unit, which in turn fractured the community, which in turn is fractured, you know, and it's just, you know, the ramifications are endless. And the mental health ramifications of that are endless. And I'm sure, once again, you have something to say on that. Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, the amount of what I would call emergencies of isolation have just skyrocketed over the last two years, right? It's just people who are anxious, who are, who are lonely, who are depressed, who have been cut off. You know, I've had people crying and just beside themselves saying that I can't see my mom. She can't fly here to see me and this and that.

And yeah, just absolutely destroying their lives. It's literally like the state wants us to be in matrix like isolation pods, you know, feeding us a steady stream of state propaganda directly into our brains and taking care of us from and then milking us for our productivity. It's soul destroying. And not only emergencies of isolation, but what I, you know, I would call emergencies of dependence. And by that I mean, and we've seen a lot of this since HHS took over,

but it's been ramped up. Again, everything that was bad about the system prior to COVID has been amplified a hundred times because of the COVID regime. And, you know, people being told constantly over the past two years, don't trust your own judgment, trust the science, trust the professional, trust the experts. People don't trust themselves when they have any kind of weird health ailment. And so the low acuity of the calls we're going to is unprecedented as well.

Just people calling us for what we would classify or look at as the most trivial nonsense reason. That's not even an emergency or even something you need to go see your doctor about. What was what's trivial? Are we talking on the finger or are we talking? Sure. Okay. I'll just give you an example. Recently,

someone had the stomach flu. Whole family had the stomach flu. A cannabis nurse friend gave, gave him a little edible that said would help. Of course, it didn't help. It made things worse and made him paranoid and stuff. So we called the ambulance because he thought,

you know, he didn't know what was going on. I mean, you shouldn't eat edibles when you're you know you're fine right and um what else oh a guy is feeling aches and pains um because he was in a car accident two weeks ago um you know just just stuff like like that just uh you know i i i took up my blood pressure reading and it and it said it was pretty high well how do you feel i feel fine okay can't you just talk to your doctor about this next time you go to see him?

Why are you calling an ambulance, taking us off the road? Just a lot of reassuring people is what's been going on over the last two years that you're okay, you're fine, you know, you're having a lot of anxiety attacks too because people just think they got, you know, they get a little sniffle or they get a cough and next thing you know, they have themselves believing they've got a deadly disease and that they call the ambulance because I think I've got COVID. I think I'm going to die. It's minor.

All your vital signs are normal. Like you're having an anxiety attack. You just need to breathe through it and don't think about it. Just a lot of that kind of thing, right? Man, that's heartbreaking. It is. And as much as you want to look down at these people and go, oh, man, this is pathetic. It's like I also understand it, right?

And, you know, it's similar to what I saw working on reserves or near reserves, right? Here you have a group of people whose legs have been broken by the government and they've been offered a crutch and they've been made completely dependent wards of the state. And that, you know, they're, they're, that creating, that, that, that environment creates a culture of complete dependency and, you know, I don't know what to think of this acre pain. So what I'm seeing now, what, what I've seen over the years on reserves has now spread out to the general population where a lot of these minor ailments are just people who are anxious, who don't trust themselves, who don't know, who aren't educated,

who think that even if they are educated, I don't know what's going on because I don't understand, you know, I'm clearly not smart enough to understand COVID and vaccines and all these things. And so I need someone, an expert to tell me what's going on with my body right now. And yeah, so we've been seeing a lot of that. You know, once again, you have an interesting perspective being all over the province, coming from a small town background. Now you're in Emmington, Emmington? Yeah, Sherwood Park.

Okay. You know, I got a show coming up here Sunday, January 22nd to the listener, and of course they can find tickets in the show notes, a little self-advertising. Anyways, it's about the rural urban divide because we've, you know, you can see the division of different populations and, well, and just how they not only vote different, but think about issues different. Sure. I'm curious, Tim, you're a guy who would have, I think, you know, as I sit here, probably a fascinating

perspective on this because you get to see, you know, you're just talking about the First Nations, you talked earlier on about Fort McMurray and different parts that way, and now being, you know, in the, you know, the capital city. city or near it. I mean, geez, sure, parts pretty much.

Eminton. It is, Eminton, pretty much. Anyways, what are your thoughts on the rural urban divide and how these different populations

are just, I don't know, I'm curious your thoughts. Yeah, I mean, it's clear. I mean, I think a lot of politics

can be chalked up to the rural urban divide, right? I mean, growing up on the farm, we didn't see the government, we didn't have much need for it. And when we did see them,

it wasn't for anything good. They weren't helping us out with anything. you know, whereas, you know, in urban areas, you know, you are, you're living on top of each other. You're very close. And so it's much more rule-oriented, right? I mean, there are rules for what you can do on the sidewalk and what you can do outside. And, you know, what one person does affects another person more.

So I think they rely on the government solving these problems a lot more. And they're not as close to the, they're not as close to, what keeps them alive as rural folks are, right? I mean, out in the country, you see life and death on a regular basis. You're involved in usually in some kind of agriculture and growing food. You see how everything's produced. And you don't have any of those responsibilities when you're in the city. You just, everything's kind of provided for you there.

It's there for convenience and it's there laid out. So you see this show up in all sorts of ways. And yeah, you know, when I worked rural, you know, I used to work, a little community called Spirit River north of Grand Prairie. And it was just a bunch, it was a big farming community. A lot of Ukrainian farmers.

And I mean, they wouldn't call 911 until their limb was wrapped up in a PTO shaft or something like that, right? I mean, you were constantly like lecturing them. Like, look, you got to ask for help more often. Like, you're showing up to the hospital basically in cardiac arrest in a private vehicle. You probably could have called an ambulance, bud.

Like, you know, ask for help. a little bit more. But, you know, again, that whole spirit of self-reliance is very strong in, in the country. Whereas in the city, it's like, oh my God, I'm anxious. I don't know what's going on. I took an edible and I have a stuck fart and I need someone to tell me what the hell's going on with me and give me some reassurance. It's a very different, you know, and so these people were saying, hey, don't call for help so much. Learn a little bit of personal responsibility. So, So how do you give, because I agree with you, like working on oneself, right, personal responsibility, taking ownership of the things that you can control, learning some things,

there's a lot of different things in that realm. How do you find a way to do that for a population that becomes more and more, well, the opposite of it? Because I, you know, I quote this stat all the time, 83.3% of Canadians live. in a rural or urban setting, sorry. How do you, you know, and that doesn't mean to say that all of them don't know exactly what you're talking about. But we can probably agree that as they move into an urban setting, the more reliance on government is just is naturally there

because that's where it is. How do you teach that or do you need the help of the bureaucracy to even get it there and that would be conflicting interest for them? Yeah, well, I don't think there's any government. solution to this that that won't horrendously backfire on us, you know. And in fact, I think what we're seeing today is a lot of that, a lot of government horrendously backfiring on us. You know, I remember in the 80s, you know, the big threats to freedom were, you know,

conservatives trying to censor stuff that you could see and say and, and different things like that and limit the thoughts you could have. And, you know, so they promoted, you know, government censorship of all sorts of things. And now the left has taken that and is basically using it as a cudgel against conservatives to censor what they can say. So anytime you give the government power to use its guns on your enemies, you give them guns that will eventually be turned on you. And so I'm very skeptical that there's any government solution to this idea of personal responsibility. But I do think the best, I don't really know the answer. Some of the things I've thought about, you know, some of the projects I would like to get off the ground in the future.

You know, I've had the opportunity to mentor quite a few young men. And there's a real shortage of masculine role models in culture. And it's usually, you know, traditional men in a family, men traditionally take on that role of teaching responsibility, right? It's like, mum wants to leave those training wheels on forever and death. dad can't wait to get them off. And there's probably a point at which it's too early to take the training wheels off. And there's definitely a point at which it's too, you've left them on way too long. And so it's that conversation between mom and dad that that kind of finds the,

hopefully the middle ground with, but it's that masculine energy that says, hey, this kid's got to learn to ride the bike. He's got to, he's going to fall off. He's going to skim his knees. He's going to learn some valuable lessons from, from engaging in that and taking some responsibility. And that's a good thing. And so, you know, there's that old saying that said, have women raise good children and men raise good adults. And, you know, we've got an infantilized culture in, in the urban areas. But I have to believe, and I see this, and I mean, Jordan

Peterson is a perfect example of this. There's a huge market demand for that masculine voice saying, hey, take the train and wheels off, take some personal responsibility in your life. Don't be afraid to fail and to risk getting hurt and to risk all these things. Because on the other side of that is learning opportunities and growth and becoming more and more competent and more confident in yourself. And I can't believe that these people that are scared, witless in their homes and anxious about every ache and pain can feel that good about their lives. And so I think there's a big market demand out there for masculine votes.

So one of the things, you know, I've been doing is just informally kind of mentoring young men who asked me for help and helping them, you know, get some good habits in their life, some discipline and take personal responsibility and different things like that. You know, I thought about maybe, I think we need a lot more of that. I think maybe bigger programs, people willing to step up as role malls. I've had the benefit of having amazing masculine role models. You know, I grew up in a fire service, basically, is it coming up in the early 20s and and seeing these guys who were running into burning buildings and, and, and, uh, hazing you, right? And making you go through the gauntlet to become included in the group and putting you under pressure and making you feel stress and making you, you know, earn that place.

And then how good it feels when he do earn your place in that group and having them, you know, like I remember the first, one of the first calls I went on as, as an EMT, I it was this cabin that burnt up it was this old hermit living in it and we were just doing a standby for the fire department and when the place burnt up we saw that that his smoldering corpse was was in there and it was burnt to a crisp I mean the only skin left on him was his bum he had his you know he was burnt from his mid-chaff femur down mid-humorous down and they like okay kid go in there and bagged that body up and I'm like what and so I went in there and like Like when I rolled them, first of all, I needed to use a pry bar to roll him up because he was stuck to the ground. Then the back of his skull came out when I rolled him

and his soupy brains fell out and a piece of his intestine flopped over and I caught a whiff of his charred bowels. And I started dry heaving off to the side. And it took me like a couple minutes to get my shit together to get back in there and bag him up. And on the way back to the station, I was sitting in the back with this guy in a body bag. And, you know,

my mentor kind of looked back at me and said, a first crispy critter kid. And I'm like, oh, God, that's so inappropriate, but so funny. And like, you know, up until that point, I was like, white face. I didn't know how to be or act. Like, I'd never seen anything like this before in my life. I just wasn't prepared for it. And, and then when he saw me laughing, he doubled down.

He's like, you guys feel like barbecue for lunch? And I'm like, oh, my God, this is so bad. This is ridiculous. But, you know, he took me, he took me aside afterwards at the station privately and said, look, I said some very inappropriate things, dark humor. That's how we deal with things. This is how we create kind of a clinical detachment from our job, how we can make the best out of a really bad situation.

What you did was, was great. You went in there and you struggled, right? Like you dry heaved, and that's normal. Every one of us goes through that. But you know what you did? You got yourself back together. You put yourself together and he got the job done. And awesome, good job.

He said, we'd never say this stuff out in public. This all stays behind closed doors. But, you know, this is how we deal with it. So he taught me two valuable things in that little conversation, that little interaction. He taught me how to have some clinical detachment, not to dwell on the tragedy that the people we deal with are going through. And he taught me that overcoming a stressful situation can feel really good

when you get the job done and do it a good. job of it. And so that year, you know, I couldn't get enough. The more gore, the more chaos, the more tragedy, really, the better. Because I was the one helping out. I was the one facing that head on and putting things back into it. And I was lucky enough to have a masculine mentor there that put me in the right mental frame, that let me see things through the correct lens so that not only did I not get broken down by my, the calls I was going on. I was actually, built up. I was becoming more and more confident, more and more confident. I was anti-fragile. I was growing from all this stress and disorder that I was being exposed to because of the way I was

confronting it. Then a couple of years later, when I graduated my ACP, my advanced care paramedic, I went to a very progressive organization, an EMS service. You know, the first mass casualty incident we went to, again, I was feeling like, yes, this is what I got into it. Yeah, we were overwhelmed. Yeah, someone died. But you know what? No one could have put that scene back together and restored order like we could. We were awesome. And then I heard, okay, we're going to have a debrief after this call, right?

And I'm thinking, awesome. We're going to talk about all the ways we kicked ass and all the ways we could do even better next time. And I was looking forward to it. And I walked into that room kind of smiling ear to ear, feeling good about my job. And it looked like I walked into a funeral home. There was a facilitator there who, turns out was a mental health facilitator. It was this new thing called critical incident stress debriefing.

And one by one, all my colleagues talked about how they were victimized by the call. All they could think about was the victim's family and how this was horrific and how they were helpless to save that life and how they, and I'm like, Jesus, I'm, I'm, I'm a monster. I'm like, I'm thinking about this all wrong. I, yeah, that person, that was a person. And here I am, just thinking about how I kicked it, how we all kicked out. on that call and someone died and and they have family and so by the time it got to me you know I was almost in tears thinking about how you know and then shortly and so now I've shifted from

this masculine kind of lens of the world about how to how to confront chaos and disorder and make it right and how that can create all sorts of great personal growth and make you more competent and a better family man and a better member of the community because, you know, you want men that are competent at dealing with disorder to now I'm a victim and I'm helpless. And that carried over into the next year. I had three kids die in the back of my ambulance and there was nothing I could do about it. And I was dwelling on this fact. And again, it was that whole victim mentality starting to insinuate itself into culture

and into my culture particularly that created anxiety, PTSD symptoms like nightmares. I couldn't look my kids in the eye. I was like I was going to quit work. I was just suffering horribly. I hit the bottle hard. And then it was one therapist session and actually one question in the therapist session

that flipped all those symptoms off and made me realize how I'd been thinking about it all wrong. And I was just commiserating about how helpless I was and how I couldn't provide any value to these people. And I'm just, I got into this profession to save lives and I couldn't even do that. And the therapist looked at me and said, Tim, I'm just an objective observer. Don't know anything about your profession. But is it really true that you didn't provide value on those calls?

And I have to think about it for a second. It put me on my heels. And you know what? I realized, look, all those family parents, they hug me afterwards and thank me for trying. thank me for bringing some order to the chaos. And like if I were in their shoes, I would have wanted someone like me, even if it was hopeless for my kid.

You know, I didn't wouldn't want to have to deal with that alone. I'd want someone who knows what to do. And, and I realized I'd been focusing on all the ways I was helpless, instead of all the ways that I was actually providing incredible value to people and doing great things. And that switched things off.

And that really set me on a journey of, you know, it's personally liberating to have that mindset of personal responsibility of focusing on the things where you can you're actually providing value of things that are within your control within your I mean if you focus on those things you'll expand that domain you'll expand your sphere of influence and control whereas the other way just caused you to shrink and break down and and we're our young men and especially, you know, urbanites are inculcated with that message. And it can't feel good to them.

And so, you know, I think we can provide another message. And I think that's one of the projects that I like to take on is thinking about how to, how to engage with people and show them a different way of looking at the world. It's like, you know, Henry Ford said, if you believe you can or you cannot, you're right. And it's the same with a lot of mental health issues. that we're faced with. Again, my daughters are both paramedics. And I had this chat with them before they went to school.

I said, you're going to be told over and over again that you're a victim of your profession, that all these calls you're going on are mental health challenges. Well, if you believe that's true, you will suffer with terribly with anxiety and PTSD like I did. You can also choose to believe something else that these calls will make you a better version of yourself. They'll become stronger, more mentally healthy because of them, and more competent and become a person that we all look to as family members in times of tragedy and chaos as our as our rock and so if you believe that that'll be true so choose what you how you want to look at your job and don't believe these people that are going to try to tell you

you're a victim that's really well a well put and I appreciate you sharing that I've been wrestling with an idea and we we started and I apologize to the listener I to regurgitate the same story over and over again, but they're saddled with me, so what are you going to do? I've been working on this idea. Well, I mean, it's been since 2018. I didn't realize I was working on it back then either. It was a group of five guys got together,

started a book club. The idea, the general idea, was better husbands, better fathers. It was just a way to get together, have a little bit of socializing, read a book, challenge someone's thoughts, hear what's going on in their personal life, and maybe go, well, maybe you get a little better

or maybe you could think about this or maybe, ah, don't look it up that way or maybe, you know, anyways. That's awesome. I love that. Well, and, well, here's the thing, Tim. Out of it sparked the podcast. The podcast came out of it. It was the first group of guys that I told the idea to.

They encouraged me to go with it. You've had one of them, Bill, or take over a butcher shop, right? He's got a, you know, another one has become, you know, so involved in his community, like from fundraising to president of this, to, you know, and another one has taken over, or not taken over, I can say that ran and become the president of arena board.

And then the other one went into politics, you know, Maverick Party and then helping start a new one in Saskatchewan. And it just, what I saw was, like, confidence, you know, and we're all, none of us are young. I'm, you know, I'm 36, so you might call me young, someone else is going to call me old, whatever. The group of us isn't like we're 80 and it isn't like we're 20. But what I saw and still see is like the confidence to go out and do things. There's always improved that's needed, but they feel confident.

I feel confident. I've been doing this almost four years. It's been pretty cool. And I'm like, how do you translate that to other men? And I'm like, they all need their own. It doesn't have to be reading. Some people can't. Some people don't want to read whatever.

but challenging the thoughts in each another's heads so that you can articulate what you're trying to say and all that good stuff and get it out of your head. I found it so healthy, right? And then to be in a safe spot with a group of men. Anyways, the story is essentially, I put this idea to two guests on the podcast, Joey and Blaine, Stefan.

And so we started a Monday book club, not a book club, a Monday, I don't know what the hell we're calling it, Monday men's group, I guess, where we get together for an hour and a half. It's a very strict hour and a half time frame where you kind of lay out a few things and then discuss an issue. And everybody kind of gets to, and I'm not saying it's a solution for the world. I'm just saying it's an idea that has worked really, really well for me. And I was one of those guys, and still am at times, that is just like, I don't know what the hell

I'm doing, you know? And I think everybody has those moments. but to have a group of men specifically for me as a married man and kids and to see other men dealing with other things and be able to offer not only suggestions but a little bit of support challenge your thoughts man don't we love a little competition of why the hell am I so pissed off at them right all those things I come out I'm really energized like I'm really really energized I'm like man that I could do that again right right isn't overdoing it it's anyways it's when I hear you talk

I'm like, I'm really glad you shared all that because the victim mentality can suck the life out of you. And with a lot of men in an urban setting, I had, you know, the dependence and everything. I don't know as farm kids, you know, you get to go out and do whatever the hell you want. I mean, it's, it's a crazy life. It's a fun life. And then now living in Lloydminster, which, you know, is certainly to certain urban settings, a smaller, definitely connected to the farming industry and the oil industry and everything else,

still in the city, and finding ways for my kids to have the same freedom that I had, where you could just walk out the front door and go find trouble. Anyways, that's my thought on what you're talking about. Well, I love that, you know, that's a great idea. I mean, it makes me want to start one of those here because, you know, I'd love to have some men in my community to talk to you about some of this stuff, because I think it is important. I mean, we've lost a lot of these,

this connective tissue in our communities, right? I mean, it used to be maybe like the Lions Club or the Legion or the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo or. Think about it. We used to, like, not we used to, but like a huge part, you know, if you rewind the clock and go back till like maybe the time of Rome, like at a young age, you were in physical combat, iron sharpens iron, you were a brotherhood.

you, and when you get into those, you get dark humor, you get all that. Like, to me, I grew up in hockey. And hockey, there's some dark humor in there, boy. So when you start talking, I'm like, oh, that's funny. I mean, it's morbid, but it's like, I get it. And it makes it funny, yeah. And the world is, that is being erased. And the problem that is, is part of that is really healthy.

Like, it's, it's, it's, I don't, I don't know the word, but I appreciate you sharing it. Yeah, well, I mean, look, what we're talking about here, I think, is what I mean by shifting culture, right? And the antidote and maybe the white pill to this problem that we face of government. I mean, we look at this problem and we see it as this giant nebulous federal government overreaching, imposing on us, destroying the family, destroying our community, destroying those fraternities that we have with with our brothers just every walk of life but reverse engineer it let's start from the bottom up how can i show up as a better person as the man in the

mirrors jordan peterson how can i clean my room right um how can i become how can i be a better husband and father to my wife despite justin trudeau and despite all the attacks on the family and whatever or hey, guess what? I still have more control in my family and more influence in my family than Justin Trudeau does. And I'm going to be the best father and husband I can be despite that bastard. How can I be a better member of my community?

What can I do in my community to provide service? Can I get together with some men and create a fraternity despite all these traditional institutions being destroyed by our government? And yes, the answer to those questions is yes. And if enough people do those things, then eventually government shifts, in my opinion. And so, you know, it doesn't have to be this, we don't have to look at this insurmountable problem and this hopeless problem and say, oh, we're paralyzed here. There's no, what's the one big solution that will fix all this? No, there is no one big solution.

That's, that is part of the problem that everyone thinks there's one big solution. And that's why we're in this quagmire to begin with, because everyone goes to government to impose their solution. but right here right now, this is the solution. This is the most hopeful I've heard you talk to the entire podcast, and I think that's something. I look at it and I go, I keep saying to myself, it's the long game. And the long game is whether or not everyone would ever adopt what I'm talking about. I'm like, I think there's something there.

It's just the long game, right? You have to focus on yourself. You need support in that. And if enough of those groups formed in just one community, imagine how strong that community would be. Right, right. And look, the people pushing the opposite of what we're pushing here are not impressive specimens in any way, right?

They are, they're dumb, they're weak, they're, you know, they're whiners, they're victims. And our goal should be to pull them out of that and like, you know, pull up your pants, stand up straight, hit the gym, read some books, you know, do something to improve yourself, take on some stressful things and confront them competently and gain more confidence in your life. All those things, we should encourage them. But if they won't, I mean, eventually we're going to win out just by the power of attraction.

I mean, what are you going to be more attracted to? A soy boy over here who's whining about everything or guys who have, are very happy in living meaningful, purposeful lives with good jobs, good family, good connections to their community. I mean, the answer is obvious. And so, you know, we don't have to have this grand plan. People underestimate what a little bit of confidence does for an individual and the power of belief. When you believe someone can do something, that is like giving them an Energizer Bunny-sized battery in a way they go. I've experienced that firsthand back, you know, I had this wonderful hockey career, Tim.

Like, you know, it wasn't the NHL. It wasn't making a million dollars by any stretch, but I got to see parts of the world that most don't, and I got to play hockey there, and it all started with me quitting hockey, and then getting a call from a coach. You know, I've been told I was not tall enough, and I wasn't big enough, and I was this and that,

and finally you just, you're just tired of it. And then you get a call, and the coach says, I'd like you come play for me. And I tell you, that right there, immediately you're like, yeah, all right, I'm out the door, because I wanted to play. I was just tired of being told,

oh, and rejected, and rejection sucks. The power of belief is a powerful thing. And a little bit of confidence, a little bit of brotherhood. I don't know where the idea leads, but I laugh because I'm like, you know, we've been, it's, I hate to stick on the doom and gloom because there's so many things coming down the pipe that just, just like, man, what are we doing in Canada? What are we doing?

And yet I, I start to see other things. And then I, you know, of course we have this chat. And I'm like, I think there's ways to push the needle the other way in a healthy. way that strengthen not only the individual, not only the family, but the community, all in not one fatal swoop. That sounds a little, but you get the point. And I don't know, that's my hope anyways. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I used to joke around about, you know, like Barocco Bama had that book called The Audacity of Hope. And I always thought, well, there's, there's no audacity in hope. I mean, if you, if you're pretty confident of the outcome, have some optimism,

how hard is it to act? I mean, it's easy to act. What's really hard to do, what's really audacious is acting when things are completely hopeless. You know, when there's zombies around you and you've got one bullet left, do you, do you take out the horde or shoot into the horde with a smile on your face or do you put one in your head and take yourself out of the game? Well, I'm the kind of guy who goes down swinging and smiling, right? But, you know, I've come to believe a little bit more in hope, right? And look, I know we've been kind of cynical and talking about how everything is doom and

gloom, but the hope for me is that despite all the doom and gloom, just even if the worst case scenario is true and society is breaking down and there's all, I just have the strong belief that me and my family and the people in my circle are going to be okay because we've got each other and we're competent and we're, you know, we know how to survive and thrive. And in fact, if we can see chaos coming, if we can see how things are falling apart, in a lot of ways, we can position ourselves in an anti-fragile way to become even better versions of ourselves on the other side of that when things reset, not maybe like the great reset, but maybe reset in a way that would be more like us, right? And, you know, there's this libertarian investor called Doug Casey who wrote a book in the 70s call, I think it was called Crisis Investing or something like that. And I mean, that's what he did. He could see the writing on the wall for a lot of countries and see how their socialist policies were going to destroy them.

And then invest in the things that were going to become very valuable when things fell apart. And that society comes out the other side and resets to something more. So, so, you know, even if things in the future get a lot more funky, let's say we still have a lot of room for optimism and we can still become better, better versions of ourselves and flourish despite it. And you can prepare now, right? Like, you know, one of the old farmers from the area once told me, something, the good times you always prepare for the bad. You always find ways to insulate yourself from what's, you know, eventually. I mean, it's not a straight up rise to. you know, utopia or whatever people think is there. You know, it's a roller coaster.

Life is a roller coaster of ups and downs. And the way you hopefully, you know, well, I just look at it and I go, so the way we can, you know, agenda 2030,

2035, there's a whole bunch of years coming up that don't sound that great, especially for what we do and everything else. So you can either acknowledge it and start to do things that will not only benefit yourself, your family,

and your community. And in turn, if all of us did that, that would be the province. That'd be the country. You get it. Um, you can do that right now. I mean, it's, it's simple as, you know, for some people hitting the gym for others, for me, I need, it's the mental warfare that just, you know, I need to sharpen my brain a lot. And I need people to challenge it. I need to have people on that, um, make me think about things. And then I need to, as I think about them, I need others to help me explore what I'm actually talking or thinking about. Because Jordan Peterson in the very beginning, what a fantastic man to watch. He still is.

In the beginning when he'd walk around, he'd be like, listen, you're getting this pretty raw. Like I'm trying to talk out my thoughts, which is a dangerous thing to do. And like early on, that was like just magnificent. Either way. Here's your final question, Tim. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm glad you reached out. I'm glad I, you know, found some time to do this.

And I'm sure down the road, we will cross pass again. It's a crude master final question. So shout out to Heath and Tracy McDonald. They've been supporters of the podcast since the beginning. And it's a deep one or an easy one. I don't know where Tim will. A libertarian probably has thought about this. I have to assume.

But it says, he's words, if you're going to stand behind a cause, then stand behind it absolutely. What's one thing Tim stands behind? Ooh, that is a deep question. Well, I mean, I stand, the thing I stand behind most consistently and absolutely is just the idea of liberty, self-ownership that you own yourself. I mean, it informs almost everything I do, all the actions I take, you know, whether it's my colleagues being threatened with firing because they're being forced to put something in their body they don't want. you know, it caused me to act, you know, and I did it at the threat of my job. You know, HR had a chat with me because of some of the things I was doing out there.

And, you know, they weren't big fans of my activism. But I've done that consistently, I guess, for the last 15 years or so. And it's got me into trouble. It's definitely not necessarily been good for my career. It's definitely harm me. So I guess my track record would say all these causes for liberty, whenever I see liberty threatened, especially in my immediate vicinity. So when it comes to my colleagues, when it comes to EMS, my community, I tend to get

very outspoken about these things. And I stand behind them to the point of personal ruin, I guess. And I have no regrets. I'm glad it's given me a purposeful life and a meaningful life. And things tend to work out, not like how you would imagine, but how, but in even better ways. You know, here I am on the Sean Newman podcast, right, the Joe Rogan of Canada. And who would have guessed that? And look, Sean, and I'll tell you that this is just the last thing.

This all stemmed, what really started making me realize I need to stand on my principles, be steadfast in the man I am, not cave to society and culture was back in, I think it was about 2008 or nine, I was in a basement fire in a hoarder's house. So imagine just junk up to your, you're waiting through this basement and it's, you're almost up to your waist in garbage and stuff. And we're kind of cowboys back then. I was a fire lieutenant. So I was leading my crew in to do this interior attack in this basement. Couldn't see our hand in front of our face because it was so thick with smoke. And we got the call to evacuate. It was getting really hot.

Instant commander saw something, said it wasn't safe for us to be in there, pulled us out. So I had my crew follow the hose line out, and I turned around to follow the hose line out. And I tripped and got tangled up and lost the hose line and was completely disoriented. And in this fire, the heat coming down on me.

He was getting hotter and hotter. I felt like it was burning. I was just panicking. And, you know, I had to, calm down, steady my breathing. And obviously I eventually got out. My radio wouldn't work, so I couldn't call for a May Day. But I spend a few terrifying minutes in there. And all the things that came flooding into my mind at that time were all the ways, all the ways that I wasn't being an authentic version of myself, that I was just, you know, following this laid out path by culture

of get that job, get that promotion, buy that second vehicle, buy that vacation home, have the two vacations a year to, you know, keep, keep working your way up like that. Collect more and more things. Collect more and more promotions. And eventually maybe I'll be fire chief and then, you know, I'll be blah, blah, blah. And I just regretted all the ways I wasn't showing up the way I should. All the ways I was censoring myself and being silent. All the ways I wasn't fighting for what was right.

All the ways I wasn't showing up as the husband I should be or the father I should be. Those regrets hit me hard. And I came out of that fire. I changed, man. And I said, I'm not doing things for a dollar anymore. I'm not doing things that make me feel weak or lesser than. I'm not diminishing myself to make society or culture feel better. And that's that mind shift opened up all these doors.

Yes, I had to quit my career, cash in my retirement. But all of a sudden, I'm working with Neil Young and Daryl Hannah and other Hollywood celebrities are coming up. And I'm working with them. And, you know, I'm getting this opportunity to run for prime minister. Who would have ever guessed that? And, you know, and all the things I've done now are related back to knowing that I was going to die. And, and that, I'm reminded every day, you know, you're going to die. What are you leaving on this table in life?

And so standing up for yourself, standing up for liberty, standing up for your community, you know, I'm going to die anyways. I might as well die doing that. That's one way to end it. I those are some words to ponder Tim I truly mean that and I say this all the time because the world is an interesting place but somewhere our paths will certainly cross again and I look forward to it and I appreciate you hopping on and being so with me today and who knows maybe the next time will be in person so we can sit across you know from each other and experience it that way I'd certainly enjoy that yeah I'd enjoy that too thanks John appreciate it